How do you upgrade your VMware ESXi host?

Answer

Answer

As shown in the following screen shot, IBM Cloud provides an operating system reload to upgrade your VMware ESXi host. An upgrade from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 and ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 requires an operating system reload to match the license.

Note: A manual upgrade of the VMware ESXi host is not supported.

Patching

Most VMware users use the vSphere Update Manager to quickly and easily download patches from the Internet and apply them to clusters according to baseline policies.

Starting with V6.5, VMware vSphere Update Manager is embedded into the vCenter Server Appliance under the Operations and Policies section as shown in the following screen shot:

Thus, you do not need to use as separate Windows virtual machine (VM) for the vSphere Update Manager. However, if you are using a version earlier than 6.5, you still need to use a Windows VM for the vSphere Update Manager.

Installing Update manager on Windows server for vSphere 6

The following steps explain how to use the vSphere Update Manager for vSphere 6 when you do not have the option to use the version that is embedded into the vCenter Server Appliance.

1. Download the Windows vCenter ISO image and install it. You will be prompted for you login information when you attempt to install the image. As shown in the following screen shot, you need to download the VWware-VIMSetup-all-6.0.0-*.iso files.
   

   
   
   
   Alternatively, you can download the VMware vCenter Server 6.0 files from the VMware web site as seen in the following screen shot:

   

2. Install the vSphere Update Manager on a Windows server.
   

   

3. Verify that the Update Manager exists in the vCenter. After you installation the Update Manager, it takes between 10 and 30 minutes for the icon to show in the vCenter. See the following screen shot:

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Manual patching

VMware ESXi provides commands to install individual patches. The following steps explain how to complete the process:

1. Verify your current version of ESXi by running the vmware -v -l command. See the following screen shot:
   

   

2. Download the patch to your ESXi host using the wget command. In this example, we are upgrading from ESXi 6.5 build 5969303 to 7967591 (ESXi 6.5 U1g). See the following screen shot:

   
   
   Refer to the Build numbers and versions of VMware ESXi/ESX topic on the VMware web site to get the correct version.

3. Put the host in maintenance mode using the following command syntax: # vim-cmd <host_name>/maintenance_mode_enter
   See the following screen shot:

   

4. Install the patch using the esxcli command. For example:
   # esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi650-201803001.zip
   See the following screen shot:

   
   
   For more information about the esxcli software command, see the “esxcli software vib” commands to patch an ESXi 5.x/6.x host article on the VMware web site.

5. Reboot the host to reflect the new patch.